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Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. Rushdie's narrative technique has connected his books to magic realism, which includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant.
Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, after publishing SATANIC VERSES. Naguib Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, criticized Khomeini for 'intellectual terrorism' but changed his view later and said that Rushdie did not have 'the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.' The Nobel writer V.S. Naipaul described Khomeini's fatwa as "an extreme form of literary criticism."
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964 Rushdie's parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus - during these years there was a war between India and Pakistan, and the choosing of sides and divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.
Rushdie continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for a time in television in Pakistan. He was an actor in a theatre group at the Oval House in Kennington and from 1971 to 1981 he worked intermittently as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.
Rushdie has been married four times, first in 1976 to Clarissa Luard and after divorce in 1988 to the American writer Marianne Wiggins. The marriage broke up during their enforced underground life. However, on September 1998 the Iranian government announced that the state is not going to put into effect the fatwa or encourage anybody to do so. According to interviews, Rushdie has decided to end his hiding. On February 1999 Ayatollah Hassan Sanei promised a 2,8 million dollar reward for killing the author. In the beginning of 2000 Rushdie left his third wife after falling in love with the actress Padma Lakshmi and moved from London to New York. They married in 2004, but in June 2007, Rushdie agreed to divorce.
After Rushdie was made a knight by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, demonstrations broke out across the Islamic world. A government minister in Pakistan declared that Rushdie's knighthood justifies suicide bombing. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (2008), finished in the aftermath of divorce, was a historical romance about the mutual suspicion and mistrust between East and West, in this case Renaissance Florence and India's Mughal Empire. From 1982, Rushdie has played himself in several television films. In 2007 he appeared as Dr. Masani, a gynecologist, in Helen Hunt's comedy Then She Found Me.